The Walking Dead’s Chief Content Officer, Scott Gimple, had announced shortly after Rick Grimes’ (Andrew Lincoln) departure from the show that Lincoln had signed on for three movies that would expand the franchise. Gimple’s plans with The Walking Dead universe involved Lincoln leaving the show.
Showrunner Angela Kang discussed her intentions with her show’s changeups. “[Scott Gimple] sort of checks in with all of the parts of the universe and is kind of making sure that things don’t conflict with each other, or that there are things that kind of lead into things,” Kang said. “For example, for us, he kind of came last year and said, ‘So, I gotta write out Rick and the thing that needs to happen for the universe is he needs to be taken off in a helicopter by one of the helicopters that we’ve seen in the show.”
After Rick’s exit, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) was not seen in the episodes that followed. On Sunday’s episode, “Stradivarius,” it was revealed that Maggie is staying with Georgie (Jayne Atkinson) in her community. Georgie was seen in season 8 where she gave Hilltop food in exchange for records.
“We will hopefully come back to Maggie’s story in Season 10,” Kang told ComicBook.com on Tuesday. “Lauren and I have been texting about some things, and we’re hopefully gonna schedule a conversation, but Georgie’s group is definitely out there in world doing some stuff, and I have some notion of what they’re up to. They may also be part of the universe in general. That’s really up to Scott, but we’ll see how it all plays out.”
However, Kang is certain that Cohan will come back to the series and has not thought of other ways to which the story of Maggie could play out if Cohan decides to not return. “It’s funny, on the show we often do that just no matter what the circumstances are,” Kang said. “We often go down multiple paths before we kind of decide on something, but I’m operating off of the idea that hopefully, we’ll get Lauren back. We’ve certainly been talking about it, so we’ll see, but yeah.”